The Muse is your ultimate career destination, offering exciting job opportunities, expert advice, and a peek behind the scenes into fantastic companies and career paths. We believe that you can and should love your job--and be successful at it--and we want to help make that happen. Whether you're just starting out, changing career paths, or aiming for the C-suite, we've got everything you need to take charge of your career.

The Right (And Wrong) Way To Measure Results

Say your goal is to increase the number of customers you serve each day. Perhaps you run a city office processing food stamp applications, or maybe you’re offering technical support for your company’s product. How many customers do you serve online, in person, and over the phone? What’s the average time to resolve a problem in each of these channels? Which types of customer requests take the longest, and which can be handled expediently?

If you can’t answer these questions, you’re setting yourself up for failure before you even begin to try.

Data-driven decision making is a way of life these days, from city hall to the corporate boardroom. If you have the numbers to dictate a course of action, the thinking goes, why would you use your heart or your mind? But in the quest to back up every move with cold, hard data, it can be easy to mistake any old numbers for useful numbers. Not all data is created equal, and the best way to ensure you’ll be collecting the right data is to develop the right set of performance metrics.

So how do you decide which metrics will help you and which will just distract you from the central issues? Here are five common mistakes people make when dealing with data, and some tips to avoid them.

Data is only useful if it allows you to measure and manage performance quality. This means it’s not necessarily as important for, say, the Buildings Department to count how many buildings passed inspection as it is for it to know the types of citations that caused them to fail, the number of inspections each inspector completed in one day, and how many buildings corrected their violations within one or two months of initial inspection. This richer set of data will reveal inefficiencies in the inspection process and allow the department to work toward better safety standards.

A common misconception is that if something can be counted, it should be counted. I’ve made the mistake of laying out tabs and tabs of metrics on a spreadsheet, only to find that the effort required to collect the data is a drain on not only my time, but the time of the people assigned to carry out the very work we’re trying to measure.

You never want your performance monitoring to be so onerous that it actually hinders performance itself. When coming up with a set of metrics, it helps to start by brainstorming everything you could possibly measure, then prioritizing the top 10 indicators that will yield the most critical information about your program. Start with a manageable load, and gradually add more—as long as the effort required to collect the data will pay for itself in useful observations and opportunities for improvement.

On the surface, it may seem intuitive that more calls answered is better than fewer calls answered. But imagine that in order to squeeze in an extra five calls an hour, the quality of each call is compromised. Less information is gathered, and fewer issues are addressed. Callers aren’t satisfied with the first call, so they call a second or a third time, further increasing your call numbers but taking up extra time and failing to address the reasons why the calls are coming in the first place. Perhaps calls that last a minute longer but more adequately address the caller’s questions end up preventing repeat calls, thus rendering the more-equals-better line of thinking not just mistaken, but backwards.

It’s also important to realize that many metrics, when counted as absolute numbers, aren’t particularly helpful. Without context, a number is more or less meaningless. Any numerator deserves a denominator, and pure numbers should be represented as a percentage of the total. For example, moving 1,000 homeless individuals off of the street and into temporary housing is laudable. But if the goal is to create housing for 20,000 homeless people, then it’s important to recognize that you’re only 5% of the way there.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.